The Facts
The Quote Quilt is a 20-week contest celebrating DDG’s 20th Anniversary. The idea is to create a story built entirely out of 20 consecutive quotes from 20 different books, one week at a time. Each week readers can submit one quote from any favorite book of theirs which builds upon the prior quotes thereby extending the story. The winning entry of the week will will be added to the story. The developing story will be posted here on the Bulldog each Tuesday afternoon at 1 p.m. Entries should be posted below in the comments box and state which book the quote is from and which week of the contest it is being submitted for.
The Payoff
Everlasting Fame and a $5 Gift Certificate which can be picked up at the bookstore.
The Rules
There is no limit to the number of entries which can be submitted, nor the number of weeks one person can win. The only rules are that the book must be in print and the quote must logically further the narrative of the story. The quote can be as short as a single sentence or as long as paragraph. It is true that first person quotes, and quotes which are not too heavy on proper nouns have a leg up. Each book from which a winning quote entry is used will be put in a special display at the store.
This Week’s Winner
Week 6 winner is Mark for a quote from Alan Bradley’s A Red Herring Without Mustard.
The Quilt To Date
“I didn’t set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.”
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
“No matter what he does, every person on Earth plays a central role in the history of the world and normally he doesn’t know it.”
“We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it!”
“Sometimes I think about how odd it would be to catch a glimpse of the future, a quick view of events lying in store for us at some undisclosed date. Suppose we could peer through a tiny peephole in Time and chance upon a flash of what was coming up in the years ahead? Some moments we saw would make no sense at all and some, I suspect, would frighten us beyond endurance.”
“And now I thought of oatmeal: in the winter, great steaming ladles of the stuff, gray, like lava dished from a volcano on the moon.”
I am a cowardly man. I say it now, now that I have carried to its end a plan whose perilous nature no one can deny. I know its execution was terrible.
“Heaven would be a comfy armchair, Kiwi decided. You’d get a great private phonograph, and all of eternity to listen to you life’s melody. You could isolate your one life out of the cacophonous galaxy – the a capella version – or you could play it back with its accompaniment, embedded in the brass and strings of mothers, fathers, sisters, windfalls and failures, percussive cities of strangers. You could play it forward or backward, back and back, and listen to the future of your past. You could lift the needle at whim, defeating Time.”
from Swamplandia! by Karen Russell